Today is exactly 186 years since the birth of Leo Tolstoy - the great Russian writer and thinker, who is widely revered throughout the world. Leo Tolstoy was born on September 9 (old style on August 28 - 1828) in the province of Tula in the hereditary estate of the mother in Yasnaya Polyana. He was the fourth child in the family. Tolstoy's mother died two years later, and the education of orphans took their distant cousin, with whom in 1837 the Tolstoy family moved to Moscow. However, shortly after his father's death and the loss of much of the state of Leo Tolstoy once again in Krasnaya Polyana, where he was brought up by the Countess Osten-Sacken, the sister of his father Nikolai Tolstoy. In 1840, after the death of the guardian, Leo moved to Kazan, where he was brought up by an aunt on his father's PI Yushkova. "Good, my aunt - a pure being," - said of her Leo Tolstoy. His literary activity Leo Tolstoy began in 1847, when during treatment in a hospital in Kazan began to keep a diary, in which, in imitation of Benjamin Franklin, set goals and objectives, improving themselves and analyzing their own shortcomings. This diary he kept throughout his life. However, the dawn of his work took place in the second half of the 19th century. Back in 1852, he conceived, and ten years later graduated from the story "The Cossacks", and then set to work on one of the greatest of his works, "War and Peace". The first three parts of the novel came out in 1868, after which there were fourth and fifth. The success of the novel was so stunning that the fifth and sixth volumes came out in print circulation growth. Leo Tolstoy during his lifetime was recognized as the head of the Russian literature. He had a tremendous impact not only on Russia but the whole world. It is credited with the evolution of European humanism and the development of the realistic traditions in world literature.